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Webmaster Tools Indexed pages vs. Sitemap?

Looking at Google Webmaster Tools and I'm noticing a few things, most sites I look at the number of indexed pages in the sitemaps report is usually less than 100% (i.e. something like 122 indexed out of 134 submitted or something) and the number of indexed pages in the indexed status report is usually higher. So for example, one site says over 1000 pages indexed in the indexed status report but the sitemap says something like 122 indexed.

My question: Is the sitemap report always a subset of the URLs submitted in the sitemap? Will the number of pages indexed there always be lower than or equal to the URLs referenced in the sitemap?

Also, if there is a big disparity between the sitemap submitted URLs and the indexed URLs (like 10x) is that concerning to anyone else?

4 Responses

If you have more URLs in your sitemap than you have indexed pages, you want to look at the pages not indexed to see why that is the case. It could be that those pages have duplicate and/or thin content, and so Google is ignoring them. A canonical tag might be instructing Google to ignore them. Or the pages might be off the site navigation and are more than 4 links/jumps away from the homepage or another page on the site, make them hard to find.

Conversely, if you had lots more pages indexed than in your sitemap, it could be a navigation or URL duplication problem. Check to see if any of the pages are duplicate versions caused by things like dynamic URLs generated through search on the site or the site navigation, for example. If those pages are the only physical pages that you have created and you know every single one has been submitted in a sitemap - and so any other indexed URLs would be unaccounted for, that may well be cause for concern, so check nothing is being indexed multiple times.

Unfortunately not, the closest you'll get is selecting a long period of time in Analytics and then exporting all the pages that received organic search traffic. If you could then cross check them with your list of URLs on your site it could provide you with a small list. But I would still check them in Google to make sure they aren't indexed. As I said it's not the best way.

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